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Popular Culture Review
Members had been taught that there were no names in Project Mayhem, but
when Jack tells everyone that “his name is Robert Paulson” (Fincher), members
embrace the interpretation that through death, the individual gains a unique
identity. This glorification of the dead allows each member to establish his role
in the organization because if they give their lives in the name of Tyler’s
worldview, they will ultimately receive the individual recognition they seek.
Homework Assignments: Bringing Fight Club Into the Real World
David Fincher’s Fight Club provides a useful mechanism for analyzing
other social movements, especially when examining the rhetorical visions of
literature associated with men’s movements. In response to a changing society
which no longer privileges males, men’s movements have emerged. While in the
past these white, middle-class males have been “Entitled to partake in the
traditional power of masculinity, these men feel besieged by new forces outside
their control and . . . they feel increasingly helpless” (Kimmel and Kaufman
263). This very helplessness is echoed throughout the men’s movement, and the
issues that they promote resemble the rhetorical visions that the Fight Club
established.
One movement that developed in response to this perceived
helplessness is the mythopoetic men’s movement. Michael Messner describes
the movement founded by Robert Bly and others who “attempted to guide men
on spiritual journeys aimed at rediscovering and reclaiming ‘the deep masculine’
parts of themselves that they believed had been lost” (17).
The relationship of this movement to Fincher’s Fight Club can be seen
by looking into the fantasy types and rhetorical visions found in the film, the
first of which is the relationship between Fight Club members and their fathers.
In a similar manner, Bly argues that in past generations, fathers were revered not
only for their role in the family but also for the jobs that they held. Times have
changed, however: “What the father brings home today is usually a touchy
mood, springing from powerlessness and despair mingled with longstanding
shame and the numbness peculiar to those who hate their job” (Bly 97).
The “Wildman” character named Iron John, found in Bly’s book of the
same title, also resembles the surrogate father role that Tyler plays for Fight
Club members. Just as Fight Club members place their trust in Tyler, the
Wildman and his teachings become the focus for the mythopoetic movement.
Fight Club members create their ovm oral tradition and revere Tyler, while the
mythopoetic men’s movement does the same with the stories they share with
each other. These stories then allow mythopoetic men to look at themselves and
their perceptions of the world with all of flieir intellectual defense mechanisms
still intact (Lucas 122). By associating with the mythic figures in the
organization, both Fight Club members and the men’s movement members are
able to connect not only with what they seek as individuals, but also with the
void they are seeking to fill.